Walking Wooden Poodle Automata / Karakuri Machine

Yesterday was my super-sweet standard poodle Fleur’s thirteenth birthday. To commemorate the occasion I dug in and built an automata in her likeness. Loosely defined, an automata (or Japanese karakuri) is mechanism that imitates the movement of a living creature. This project has been on my to-do list for several years and I thought it was about time I gave it a go.

The mechanism is based on a popular design that’s been around for a while. In the early 2000’s Theo Jansen, either refined or invented the linkage for his very popular wind-powered walking machines. Each part of of Jansen’s mechanism is carefully specified, elegant and mind-boggling in it’s function. Me? Well, I just sort of guesstimated the dimensions and ran with it.

I first made templates out of cardboard of each part. Each template was transferred to 1/8″ plywood and cut out using a scroll saw. The holes for the pivots were made with the drill press. I then used 1/8″ wooden dowels to assemble the mechanism.

Assembly was tricky at times because I didn’t have an assembly schematic. I just went with the flow. I made sure the dowels were plenty long to allow me to put the puzzle together on the fly. Once everything was in place the excess was trimmed from each dowel.

All in all I’m pretty impressed with the complete mechanism. This was the first, but certainly not the last machine of this style I build. I already have tweaks I’d like to try to give this girl a little more life. Watch the machine in action in the video below.